The Turnip Princess: and Other Newly Discovered Tales

Resumen del libro

This is a fascinating trove of recently discovered stories by an author who ranks with the Brothers Grimm, Charles Perrault, and Hans Christian Andersen in the fairy-tale canon. During the 1850s, Franz Xaver von Schonwerth traversed the depths of the Black Forest and scaled the heights of the Bavarian Alps, searching out and recording new fairy tales with such dedication that his contemporaries the Brothers Grimm declared, 'Nowhere in the whole of Germany is anyone collecting folklore so accurately, thoroughly and with such a sensitive ear'. But except for a small portion of the tales collected in an obscure 19th-century volume, Schonwerth's works were lost - until a few years ago, when a researcher unearthed thirty boxes of manuscripts in an archive in Germany.

Now, for the first time, Schonwerth's lost fairy tales are presented in English. Here are startling, chilling, and enchanting new tales: a girl turns herself into a pond to escape a witch, only to have her pursuer drink her down; a prince is transformed into a dung beetle, condemned to filthy labor until his true love's kiss saves him; and King Goldenlocks undergoes an adventure that is part 'The Frog King' and part 'Snow White'. And Schonwerth's dedication to accuracy - he did not embellish the stories he heard, but set them down on paper as they were told - reveals new dimensions to classic favorites: Jodl, a young prince, overcomes his revulsion to a female frog and finds it transformed into a beautiful princess.

Stripped of the literary flourishes and agenda of the Grimm brothers, these stories are now revealed in their authentic oral forms - with the traditional roles of heroes and heroines upended, and the darker details that the Grimms sanitized restored - revolutionizing our understanding of the classic fairy tale. Translated and edited by Maria Tatar, the eminent Harvard fairytale scholar, along with Erika Eichenseer, director of the Franz Xaver von Schonwerth Society, this collection reveals the original, irresistible uncanniness of a hallowed literary form. Franz Xanver von Schonwerth (1810-1886) was born in Amberg, Bavaria.

He had a successful career in law and the Bavarian royal court, rising to the post of personal secretary to the Crown Prince Maximilian. In the 1850s he began to explore the culture of the Upper Palantinate region of Bavaria, recording his observations and the stories of the people he interviewed. Eventually he devoted himself full-time to his research and, between 1857 and 1859, published From the Upper Palantinate: Customs and Legends, cataloging the customs and folktales of his homeland in unprecedented detail.

This work contained only a fraction of his total research, the rest of which was eventually discovered in an archive, forming an important addition to the canon of classic fairy tales. Maria Tatar chairs the program in folklore and mythology at Harvard. She is the author of many acclaimed books on folklore and fairytales, as well as the editor and translator of The Annotated Hans Christian Andersen, The Annotated Brothers Grimm, The Classic Fairy Tales: A Norton Critical Edition, and The Grimm Reader.

Eeika Eichenseer is a historian and preservationist working for the Bavarian government and the director of the Franz Xaver von Schonwerth Society.